The following essay by Lai Sam with Ambassador of Peace Scott Wright (at left), who were matched as a Peace Pair in early 2023, was published in the Winter (December) 2023 Peace Current, Pax Christi USA’s membership newsletter. Lai joined a five-day immersion trip in November with Scott and Jean Stokan in El Paso, TX.
Peace Pairs is the intergenerational co-learning program of Pax Christi USA, which connects a young adult peacemaker in their 20-30s with an Ambassador of Peace or other longtime Pax Christi member for a 12-month period. A new cohort will be start in early 2024. Stay tuned for information about how to apply to participate.
[After my first day in El Paso,] I’ve already had the immense privilege of being a part of the migrants’ lives, even if briefly, as they made difficult decisions of leaving their lives, families, and everything they had and knew back home so they could find work to feed themselves and their families. Many of them leave tomorrow on the bus for Chicago, Denver, New York, and Tennessee, with little money in their pockets and no plans of where to go or what to eat, and not knowing the language or the country, and their right to be in this country remains uncertain.
Yet in the midst of such suffering, there is so much beauty, resilience, compassion, strength, and optimism – such as stories of migrant families at the shelter pooling together what little money they have to help another family pay for their bus ticket; mothers making difficult decisions such as deciding which one of her children to take as she made the dangerous and arduous journey of three months from Venezuela across the Darien Gap with her newborn child and teenage daughter, in search of work, so she can feed herself, her children, and her five other children back home; children finally being able to be children after the trauma of traveling across the dangerous journey for three months, as they laughed and danced to music with other children at the shelter; an 11-year-old girl named Esperanza (name changed) who looked after another mother’s infant baby as the infant’s mother showered.
And all the children running to give me hugs as I left tonight; Esperanza telling me there was space if I wanted to stay with them tonight. I have witnessed more generosity and compassion in this short period of time in those who have nothing than in all my life in people who have everything.
May the hearts of people and politicians in the U.S. and across the world soften as they develop empathy and awareness for the difficult choices that migrants have to face, migrants leaving everything they knew behind to a new, unknown world where they fight for the right to exist, to change the narrative around migrants who are fighting for the right to be human. It doesn’t matter if they are unskilled or don’t speak English. Every human should be entitled to having their basic rights like being able to feed themselves and their family. And may we continue to support people who dedicate their entire lives, like my peace pair Scott and his wife Jean, to fighting for the rights of immigrants and refugees, and for a more peaceful and just world.
For me, this trip is becoming apparent to me that I have been living in my own silo, stuck in my own world of my problems and challenges, and needing to do more than making that 10 percent donation to people who struggle for the right to live and exist in this world.
Lai will be sharing more on her immersion in El Paso in the coming weeks.
“LET ‘EM IN !!”
Lai, Scott, and Jean,
Thanks for letting “em in” and letting us peek “in” on the world you live and give in daily. Your empathy, and I do mean that of the three of you and those immigrants who experience your care, is an example to me that I dream to live with our dear neighbors, wherever we find ourselves.